Actions and Results: 1 Thing I Learned That Helped My Business Grow 5000% the First Year!

Welcome to today’s video. Today’s video I’m going to be focused on something I’ve actually taught about before. And the reason I want to teach on it again, and this is something I’ve been teaching on for years, is the power of what this message is about. And honestly this is actually what I’ve been going through with several of our companies recently, and I continuously do it over and over and over.
Behind me you’ll see a simple diagram. Beautiful artwork, right? I’m not an artist. One column is on actions, one column is on results. And the key to this video, what I want to talk about, is leverage. Making sure that you’re leveraging all the assets in your business. All of your own personal assets if it’s just you in your business. If you have a larger company, how to get your people to leverage their abilities to hit the best actions to create the most results possible.
In today’s video, let’s start out with this kind of explanation of what’s behind me. I learned a long time ago actually, I spent years and years failing in business when I was just by myself, and then started to hire some different people. What I learned is that I wasn’t getting the result I wanted in my company at that time. And at times even now I’ll look at – and this is what I just went through in one of our companies – is just looking at what is the result we are getting right now, and why is that? In kind of figuring that out, but then also how do we improve upon what we’re doing?
I could apply this as well to my marriage, to raising my kids, to maybe in ministry or something, in giving. Whatever it might be. But, for me, I’m going to apply this video to business but the same concept, the same action, could apply to any area of my life. And that is what actions am I taking right now to create the results that I am receiving in my life.
For me, early on in business, I spent a lot of time in this red area. Which red is not necessarily a good thing. We want to be in the green money. The red area is where you can spend a lot of time. This is your actions column. You could spend a lot of time doing a lot of activities, brainstorming ideas. Activities aren’t going to yield you the results you want. And what happens is, this is called – many of you may have heard of what’s called the Pareto Principle, it’s an 80/20 rule. But I saw this written out years ago and it really helped give me a visualization of what it means, but then how to apply it not just to myself but I’ll do this with each and every department in our company like what are our top goals, what are we focused on, what are we going after.
And the reason I do that is because if we spend a lot of time here, these are the result you get. If you spend your time in the 80% of the activities that yield 20% of the results it gets very, very frustrating. You don’t make money, people get frustrated, and you just don’t have any fun. So what we want to do is figure out what are the actions that are in the top 20% which yield 80% of our results. That way we can be laser focused, laser targeted. Not just ourselves, again, and I’ll go into other videos about how you do this with your team, how do you do this within your relationships, how do you know what people’s strengths are to make sure they’re operating here. Because you might have a list of activities in front of a person that would yield this type of results. But if it’s the wrong person – it’s never the wrong person, well, it can be the wrong person – if it’s the wrong skillset in a person they’re going to have a hard time execute on these actions to create these results.
Leverage is key in your business. And leveraging your time is your number one asset really. And leveraging your people’s time. A lot of times, when you look through your financial statement on your business, if you have employees, one of your biggest expenses is going to be payroll. So why not learn how to leverage that to the best of your ability to create the best result possible.
I own and operate several companies – I’m leaning down here. And I was working on a sheet yesterday just going through five different companies I operate right now. And what are the three – what I do is I take this concept, I’ll look at the current numbers. So what are the current numbers we’re getting in our companies. So that would be one of the first steps I’d share with you is if you already have a company in action what are the results we’re getting. Where are those results coming from, and then look at how we can increase upon that result.
The opposite is also true. What are the results that we are getting that are minimal that are taking so much time that it’s really starting to kill our business, or kill our – whether it’s my sales, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s technology, whatever part of your company that it would be in. Again, this applies in all areas of life, but it takes time to self-examine yourself and to go through this exercise. I believe you should do this at least once a month if not even daily. Reviewing what are your actions every day. We do review our dailies every day.
So this is our actions yields this result. You don’t want to be stuck in these actions which yield these results. All right so, I’ve got this sheet in front of me because it’s actually showing the different companies that I own, and what are the kind of top three. One of them is really expanded upon, which is what I’m going to get into here a little bit. This I didn’t write special for this video, this is actually been on my board since, I believe February. And it’s some of our key leverage points for my one company Aramis Interactive. And what we are is our own publisher of our own websites. We also sell advertising. This is our company that we grew to number four I believe in Central Pennsylvania. Fastest growing companies in the last few years. It’s been a lot of my focus in the last three or four years.
What I want to do in these videos is teach you out of businesses that I’m running. So this isn’t something I’m reading – I’m pointing at my bookshelf – reading out of a book. It’s not something that I’m just coming up with. It’s something that’s been time tested and true. So, with one of our companies, Aramis Interactive, what I want to focus on is this has been our goal. So when I have a team meeting with team leaders on this company, I’m going to be focused on how are we progressing toward these goals. What’s going on in your department. What can we do to increase, and really there are usually three areas? Which goes back to this result, and actions as well. Is we’re always focused on how can we increase our clients. How can we increase the frequency of those clients, the times that they buy from us or they visit our website? And how do we increase the initial value for that client. Whether they are buying an e-commerce product. Whether for us, they’re going through a website and we’re trying to optimize who that user is to deliver them the advertising, the advertisement that would best benefit them. And then also working with our advertisers.
Let’s say for example we’re working with Lending Tree. And they’re trying to find someone that’s looking for a mortgage, or a refinance. How do we profile our user the best so we can deliver the best client to Lending Tree? And then a result we can earn a lot of money doing that as well because we’re going to have a high value click, or transfer to LendingTree.com
So, with our company right now, in those three areas I mentioned – these aren’t actually in the exact order – but the top thing that we’re doing is increasing – and this has been my focus for us corporately – how to increase the value per client. For us, there’s something called a TCPA. Basically, we’re trying to increase the value of our records coming through. We’re looking at how we can be doing more with our emails. That’s a main revenue generator in our company. So we’ll be doing lots of testing. Now this doesn’t get into all the specifics of what we’re doing. That’s more on this sheet, and I’ll shoot other videos on that.
Another thing, how can we increase our conversion, because this is focused on how do we increase the value of that user coming through so we can have more conversions into sales. So we’re going to increase our clients, we’re going to increase our frequency of that user, and we’re going to increase the initial order. The other thing we’re focused on is our path optimization. So the process, the flow, you can call it a funnel, of the user coming through. How do we optimize that to make more per user coming through? Media buys – this doesn’t have our specific strategy, but how do we increase the number of clients we have? So what’s our media buying strategy now, not just for May but for this quarter? Or for 2017, for 2018 what do we want to see happen there? And, for us, we’re increasing our media buys. We’re launching new websites, it allows us to have broader access to more people to increase our number of clients.
And then as far as how do we increase – so I’ve talked about how to increase the initial value – the users coming back to our websites. One of the strategies we’re focused on right now is a lot of retargeting, or people once we actually bring them back to our website – this is something you’ll need to look at in your business – if it’s their first visit, second visit, third visit, fourth visits. What do we do with duplicate users? What are products they haven’t seen before? We don’t want to show the same advertisements, or the same – if you sell products through an e-commerce sight, or whatever your product may be. If you sell certain books, or products, if they haven’t bought it you may not want to show them the exact same sales flow as they’re going through it. Look at and analyze the numbers because they are going to show you where the value is in each of your users.
So, that’s what this video is on, it’s kind of a broad level I wanted to show you some of the things we’re doing in our current business. And I could take you through the other companies I have, what are our top three focuses with in those three categories. I would encourage you today to look at your business. Look at what are the actions that you’re taking, and really what are the results you want. And really you could kind of backtrack it. If I want this result; if I want to make $100,000 a month, if I want to make $1,000,000 a month, whatever it would be the number, $10,000 a month. What are the actions that we need to do to get that result? And if you’re day isn’t spent at least 80% of the time to get that action, you’re not usually going to get that result.
So that’s the video of the day, increasing your productivity. Staying focused and leveraging all of the assets that you have in yourself and in your company. Thanks and I’ll see you on the next video.

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Jeff Usner is a sought after marketing expert on business growth, lead generation and sales processes, and, founder of several companies, that are a leading online education platform teaching you how to make more money on the Internet.